Author: Lisa Grossman / Source: Science News
Saturn’s moon Dione is streaked with long bright stripes, and no one knows how they got there.
Planetary scientists first noticed the stripes in pictures taken with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017 (SN: 4/14/18, p. 6). Found near the moon’s equator, the long, thin, bright lines run surprisingly parallel to each other for tens to hundreds of kilometers. And the stripes seem unaffected by other features in the pocked and ridge-lined landscape, researchers report online October 15 in Geophysical Research Letters.
“They’re just really bizarre,” say study coauthor and planetary scientist Emily Martin of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “It’s really exciting when you see something really strange, and you’re just trying to figure out what the heck it could possibly be.”
Dione’s distinctive marks aren’t the only streaks in the solar system. So Martin and planetary scientist Alex Patthoff mapped the structures and compared them with straight lines found on other celestial bodies, including the Saturnian moon Enceladus, Earth’s moon and Jupiter’s moons Ganymede and Callisto to see if any of them could offer clues to the mysterious stripes.
The most famous stripes in the Saturn system are on icy moon Enceladus, which spews plumes of water from “tiger stripes” near the moon’s South Pole. Those stripes are thought to be cracks in the moon’s icy crust that open and close with…
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